Populist magazine The Week has sprung up with a circulation of 500,000 — no small feat in a climate where newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek continue to see their numbers slide. Haven’t picked The Week up recently? You’ll appreciate its “front of the book of the Economist” approach, where the week’s biggest news items from around the world get summarized into bite size pieces, leaving you significantly more worldly after flipping through its pages. Perhaps you also forgot who’s running the magazine: Felix Dennis, of that little magazine that refused to grow up, Maxim.
So how come this magazine is such a breakout hit, while its brethren are fighting for oxygen? Because Dennis & Co. have thrown journalistic principles in the crapper! CONTINUED »
SURPRISE! NEWSPAPER CIRC IS DROPPING Oh, this is gonna be a fun war: For the six months ending in March, the New York Times‘ Sunday circulation dropped 9.2 percent, or 150k copies, to 1,476,400. (Daily circ dropped 3.8% to 1,077,256.) Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, which is clearly intent on killing the Times, saw daily circ grow a smidge, 0.3%, to 2,069,463 copies. [E&P]
AUDIT BUREAU OF PERCOLATION With audit data finally here for 2006 (Was Britney a complete mess then? Cannot remember!), the celebrity weeklies are showing off just how many times they missed their rate bases. Every tabloid missed the mark in double digits, except for People BECAUSE THEY ARE PERFECT. [NYP]
Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report will slash its rate base from 2 million to 1.5 million, begging the question: Have you ever personally met any of the 1.5 million people supposedly reading U.S. News & World Report? [MP]
Turns out People magazine’s Christina Aguilera baby photo issue, which cost them a reported $1.5 million, sold better than the estimated 1.3 million copies originally thought; it moved 1.45 million on the newsstand.
That’s one highlighted stat from the latest tabloid data, which shows People up 5 percent year-to-date, with an average 1.5 million copies moving on the newsstand, according to ABC data being released today. The mag’s biggest mover? January’s Heath Ledger, which sold 1.8m, thanks to it being the only weekly to close late enough to catch the obit. But that issue is expected to be bested by Jennifer Lopez’s newborn twins, with estimates of 1.9m.
And how is the competition faring? CONTINUED »
Vanity Fair’s July 2007 Africa issue, guest-edited by Bono, was Graydon Carter’s best-selling issue last year. Why so successful? Our money’s on the twenty different covers Annie Leibovitz shot for the issue, letting customers scoop up at least a few of the covers to display on their Design Within Reach coffee tables. [min]
We’re hearing People’s J. Lo twins issue moved between two and three million copies at the newsstand, according to multiple scan data sources. (Distributor AMI says 3m; supermarket data say 2m.)
By comparison, Nicole Richie’s baby issue is said to have sold 1.8 million at the newsstand, while Christina Aguilera’s moved an estimated 1.3 million.
Conde Nast Portfolio is doing aiight. [WWD]
New York magazine’s publicist Serena Torrey, who you probably heard from already about Sunday’s Oscar party at Spotted Pig – which we’re totally disinvited from this year – is on the defense after Keith Kelly reported a few facts about the pub’s recent misfortunes. Even though “Web traffic” (pageviews? unique visitors?) on nymag.com is up 2000 percent from last year, as Torrey claims, newsstand sales dwindled 7.8 percent in the second half of 2007, Keith reports. NOT FAIR!, argues Torrey.
“In fact,” she whines in to Romenesko, “New York raised newsstand prices by 25% in July 2007 AND we cut draw by more than 2%. We planned and budgeted for a much more dramatic falloff in newsstand sales (which represents only 5% of our circulation to begin with) in the second half of last year; 7.8% falloff was a major victory — as was getting our bulk to 48k (down from twice that two years ago).” See how anything can become good news?
BY THE NUMBERS Portfolio is averaging about 300,000 subscriptions and sells 85,000 copies on the newsstand each issue, with about a 15 percent sell-through. Experts suggest these are not numbers Conde Nast is pleased with. Because you need EXPERTS for that. [WWD]
Last week’s OK! magazine (the one with Rachael Ray on the cover) barely broke the 300,000 sales mark, according to a source with knowledge of scan data. (Calls and emails to OK! haven’t yet been returned.) That’s the lowest figure in recent memory for the Richard Desmond tabloid import. Something tells us this week’s “Jamie-Lynn is preggers!!!!!@#$%#$^@#$!” issue will fare better.
Meanwhile, with that same Dec. 12 issue, OK! went through a barely-noticed change: Us-ifying its logo. (The old logo is on the far left.)
Lucky them, it looks like they still have a few months before Jamie-Lynn’s baby is born, and they’re forced to cough up $1 million for photo rights. So keep trying new things.
Everyone from Long Island is a liar. Have you ever met someone from that region who tells the truth? No. Stereotypes are always true.
Need proof? Newsday and the Spanish Daily, Hoy, lied about their circulation figures to advertisers between 2001 and 2004. And they were both based in Long Island when the lying went down.
The result: $15 million in fines to settle federal criminal fraud investigations, $83 million in restitution to advertisers and remedial management and internal auditing. CONTINUED »
Never one to boast, the ever-modest New York Daily News has issued an understated response to the latest circ figures which (according to the DN, who fails to provide the actual figures) conclusively demonstrate that the Mort Zuckerman owned tabloid has “strengthened its position as the true voice of New York.” And that’s not all!
For the stunning 16th year, the Daily News reigns as the largest circulated daily newspaper in the New York metropolitan area, in figures published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).
Proving that quality journalism will always win, the Daily News reclaimed its position as the fifth-largest newspaper in the country - reaffirming our belief that we provide the BEST local coverage of the world’s greatest city.
And we couldn’t agree more with their mode reasoning. If, however, the above writing is any indication of the quality journalism we can expect from the 16th annual circ leader, we’ll be picking up the New York Post the next time we’ve got half hour to kill on public transportation.
Sometimes I just have to say, “what the fuck?” and the royal we doesn’t work as well. These are my thoughts—raronauer
For all the talk about declining subscription rates, it turns out the newspapers don’t really care that much. Papers are selling 10 percent fewer copies than they were in 2000. But many papers are cutting back on ventures that would help them get subscriptions anyway, the Times reports today.
Raising subscription rates does not appease advertisers, and the cost of getting a new subscriber through cold calling and other methods is significant. So many newspapers have just resigned themselves to a lower circulation, hoping that a bigger Web presence will make up the difference.
CONTINUED »
Media buyers (namely, MediaVest) want magazine publishers to start issuing per-issue rate base guarantees, rather than bundling the circ for multiple issues for an average.
Not surprisingly, publishers aren’t interested, especially when they’d be penalized for missing their numbers but not rewarded for exceeding ‘em. Men’s Health might be the only title fully on board, but only because it’s in the fortunate position of using chiseled biceps and unruly abs as a distraction. [AdAge]
Back when we were about 11 or 12, we made our mother write a cheque for a subscription to Reader’s Digest. We quite liked those real-life medical mysteries … or was it the true-life tales of overcoming obstacles? Either way, we kept the subscription active for a couple years, eventually letting it fizzle out for one reason or another, but probably because we realized we weren’t the mag’s target audience. That is, we weren’t a 65-year-old grandmother of 12.
Turns out, we weren’t the only ones to let our subscription fizzle out.
The Post and Daily News have been fibbing to us about their real circulation? It dampens the spirit, makes a sunny day cloudy, reeks of killing puppies. But that’s the bad news that’s been broughten, with Nat Ives on the case. It all has to do with their use of “paid” copies that aren’t actually bought at, say, the newsstand, but rather handed out wrapped in an advertiser’s message. If you stop looking at those numbers, another picture emerges: “Individual paid copies at the Post fell to 91% of its paid total in the latest reporting period, from 95% in 2005. At the News, individual paid circulation fell all the way to 80% from nearly 94% in 2005. ” And at both papers, rationalizing away the way they do business jumped 120%.
At least when the New York Post runs a full-page ad tomorrow proclaiming its circulation gains, the Daily News won’t have to sit in a corner and cower, for it, too, saw readership increase. The Audit Bureau of Circulation’s latest figures, released today, show the Post gaining 7.6%, bringing daily circ to 724,748, while the News climbed 1.4%, to 718,174.
And that’s about where the celebration ends. Most other papers saw circ drop, including the New York Times (1.9%), Washington Post (3.5%), Boston Globe (3.7%), Los Angeles Times (4.2%), Chicago Tribune (2.1%), Newsday (6.9%), and some paper in Texas (Dallas Morning News) that dropped 14% after doing away with circulation methods that probably shouldn’t count for anybody.
But hey, it’s not like Americans are watching the evening news, flipping through magazines, or reading books in substantial quantities either!
Update: Look at that … the Post is already celebrating.
Jann Wenner’s circulation scheme to have Us Weekly hit its rate base comes at such an inopportune time. Well, inopportune time for him — he’s got two ill fellas to juggle. For us? It’s perfect timing to pounce on the tabloid while it’s down.
So here’s how it goes: Jann wants to bring Us‘ guaranteed circ to 1.85 million to stay competitive and/or bolster his ego. (You guess the more likely scenario.) Sadly, he doesn’t have that many real readers. So he writes a cheque to Hachette Filipacchi for the 409,000 names from Premiere magazine, which just folded, paying about $2 per name to drop them on Us’s roster. All this on the heels of a scramble to meet its previous 1.75 million rate base — a goal met by ramping up the number of “verified” copies, bringing the total to 1,751,709.
With Premiere’s readers, he’ll easily be able to hit his new target. So on to the next dilemma: Janice Min’s contract negotiations, which we hear are still on-going.
We rarely have much to say about Men’s Journal, and that’s for a couple reasons: 1) It’s not Men’s Health; 2) It’s edited by Jann Wenner. Okay, Reason No. 2 should actually give us plenty reason to gab, so maybe it’s just the single rationale.
But alas, someone with enough time to pour over Audit Bureau of Circulation data files a report with us that says Men’s Journal’s numbers dropped by 26 percent on the newsstand in ‘06. While total circ was 710k, 92,000 of that were “public placed.” Sans those numbers, the book was actually 12 percent below the 700k rate base. Sounds like some make goods are in order.
Editorial Director
